Modern businesses increasingly use conferencing systems for enabling telecommunications between people around the world. Conference calls involving three or more people are common today, and as the global economy continues to expand, the importance of conferencing systems is expected to grow.
Present conferencing systems often use a media mixer to multiplex audio and/or video data streams into mixed streams that are dispatched to conference participants. Media mixers are typically physical or logical devices having a capacity limitation that restricts the total number of conference participants that can be handled. Thus, the total number of conference participants within a conferencing system is typically limited by the capacity of the media mixer being utilized.
Prior art methods for increasing the call capacity of a conferencing system have included increasing the physical capacity of a media mixer and/or adding a logical control device that can combine media mixers at a physical layer into a larger logical entity. However, both of these methods typically require substantial redesign of a media mixer by a vendor at a relatively high cost. Furthermore, these methods generally create a conferencing system with a static call capacity that a user is unable to change.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a conferencing system that overcomes the above deficiencies associated with the prior art by utilizing multiple mixers.